At the same time, Jonathan Richards, the Guardian’s interactive editor, was evaluating what would be needed to create “rich article pages” incorporating all the available media at their disposal.

“There was, I guess, an appetite to see how you might integrate those media, ie the visual and audio media, in a much more tightly integrated way,” said Richards. “So rather than doing things that would simply supplement a text page, how could they perform a more compelling and stronger function in the interactive and I guess that was the challenge that we set ourselves.”

As such, the media was conceived differently right from the start, said Richards. So instead of talking heads and general views of the area, they needed something to cater more specifically to the project’s needs: images and footage that would complement and supplement the traditional storytelling forms.